


Canvas

by VeritySilvers



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-10
Updated: 2012-06-10
Packaged: 2017-11-07 11:31:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/430638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VeritySilvers/pseuds/VeritySilvers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her first scar comes from Clint.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Canvas

Her first scar comes from Clint.  


It’s not quite her first, of course: there’d been others before it, but they’d been temporary, like the tattoos children press onto their arms with sponges on hot summer days. Except there had been blood trickling down her skin instead of water, and bandages peeled away instead of paper, and those scars had been covered up with medical science and tricky surgery rather than worn away and rubbed off like faded, press-on party favors.  


To be fair, there had been relatively few scars before Clint, and they’d all been minor except for the one across her stomach. A cut here, a scratch there – her trainers had seen to it that she received prompt medical attention after every mission, and skilled reconstruction with delicate skin sewn back into place with tiny, neat stitches.  


A spy can’t have any identifying markers, after all. Hair and eye color and even skin tone can be changed, but bones can’t change length and skin can’t shed what carelessness allows to become permanent.  


(She has freckles, sometimes, when she’s in the sun, and they made her nervous even as they delighted her when she was young: they’re her own, something that marks her real self, and oh God what if that’s used to identify her when she needs to be anonymous.)  


Moreover, scars are unseemly. She still has a girl’s slender body when she receives her first scar and has it taken away from her: she will be a pure canvas, she is told, as they scrape away the scar tissue with a sharp knife. She bites her lip so hard it bleeds as they carefully re-stitch the small cut again, carefully, precisely, so that no new scar tissue will form.  


She will be a pure canvas, and to do that she needs to be able to shed everything that makes her herself, scars included.  


Later, when she has a woman’s curves, she understands that men prefer women with smooth, tight skin. Women with scars imply women are dangerous, or capable of facing danger, and men are lulled into security by a pretty woman with no scars from other men, other battles, on her back.  


So Natasha’s body is kept from scarring even as her mind is broken and remade so many times that it sometimes seems that all her thoughts are bleeding out, too torn apart to have the time to scar over.  


They give her medical attention, of course, and keep wounds from scarring over when they have the chance. But when the scar has already appeared, there are lips pressed together in disapproval, hard fingers on her arms, and knives and needles to remove it.  


The first scar she kept came from Clint, and it’s on the inside of her forearm on her right arm.  


It’s not the first scar he’d given her: no, there had been other scars, over the months and years he crossed paths with her. It had been accidental, at first – at least, so he claims, and while she doesn’t trust much in this world, she trusts his word. Accidental meetings and inopportune moments across the world, when he was trying to go unnoticed and she couldn’t help but see him, or when she had a target he couldn’t let her kill. Then it had turned intentional, of course; SHIELD had determined her threat level, and it had risen too high.  


He’d hunted her, and she no longer has the scars to prove it. Sometimes she thinks she does – things were disintegrating, there, towards the end – red rooms went grey and orders came late and safehouses moved without warning. There’s a small indentation in the back of her left thigh, as though a child had pressed down on river sand to leave a finger-print. It wasn’t the first time Natasha had been shot, but it was the first time that the ghost of a scar had remained afterwards, and when she’d first realized that, she’d sworn to kill him for marring her perfect pure canvas.  


But that’s not how their next fight went, and by the time Clint got her out of Sao Paolo and away from the hideous smoke of the hospital, the mark he’d left on her arm had scabbed over. She’d known it would scar, sitting in a helicopter and watching him with slitted, half-trusting eyes as they flew over the Caribbean. She’d known and she hadn’t cared, because her body was her own canvas now, and if she chose to let him mark her, no one could tell her otherwise.  


(It’s not that she kept his scar because she wants to be his, or because she wanted to mark a turning point in her life, though both might be valid reasons, but because it seems fair to her that he’s imprinted on her skin and she’s scored onto his, because he’s the reason she’s here and she’s the reason he stays.)  


So she has a small scar on the inside of her forearm on her right arm, a jagged little crescent that doesn’t look at all like the teeth that formed it. It doesn’t look like a bite mark, but that’s because she was moving so quickly his teeth didn’t set perfect into her flesh: instead they tore, deep on one end and shallow on the other, slicing down into her arm as they both scrabbled for the gun she’d dropped.  


It’s not the only time he’s bested her in hand-to-hand. But he so rarely manages it that the scar reminds her that the unexpected can happen, that even what she’s safely managed for years now can harm her.  


She gains more scars the longer she works at SHIELD. It’s not that she minds, precisely, though there’s a little piece of her mind which worries about identifying marks and target alertness. But she is her own canvas now, and she doesn’t care for purity. Sometimes she’ll keep a scar, when it matters; sometimes she’ll put salve and creams on her skin to avoid one.  


She keeps the scar Coulson gives her, because he’s good to her. He hadn’t meant for her to take a blade to her upper arm, hadn’t mean to leave her alone in that situation for so long, and she can see the angst on his unreadable face whenever she wears the sleeveless summer uniform. It makes him a better handler, she thinks viciously on her bad days, because he knows now that she’s human and bleeds for his mistakes. She’s sorry she had to gain it, but he learned his lesson well.  


So she collects scars, haphazardly, and keeps the ones that matter. Clint scars her the most, but then she trusts him the most; he is the one to guard her back, and she’s scarred him more times than she can count. They stagger out of missions together, patch each other up together, report in to Coulson together, who watches over them both with eyes that can see to the scarring of their souls and not just their bodies.  


He tries to heal both of them, mind and body, and because he tries without pity and revulsion, his attempts matter. Slowly, her scars are less about failures and more about friendships, written on her skin in something more permanent than ink. Tattoos fade, she knows, and so do scars, eventually, but it comforts her to look down at her skin and see testimonies of loyalty scrawled across her body in healed pain and blood.  


Scars don’t panic her anymore, and she doesn’t think of pure canvases when she looks in the mirror. The faint white lines on her skin please her, just as the tougher, raised bundles of tissue are reassuring to run her fingers over. They’re reminders, she thinks, and gifts, little signs of affection from the men in her life. Because Coulson couldn’t give her anything tangible to keep, and she can never tell him how much his approval means to her, but she’ll wear his mark on her skin until she dies. And that just might be enough.  


Clint traces the scars he gave her with reverent fingers and a wicked tongue, and he loves knowing that it is his mark on her forearm that started it all, because it means that she believed him enough to leave her conditioning behind for that first, shaky step towards being her own canvas. So he kisses her there, and on the back of her thigh where he shot her and they tried to erase his touch from her body, and on all the tiny little scars she’s gained from associating with him. But his favorite scar on her is on her fingers, her right hand, the insides of her fingers where she’d once curled her hand so tight around an arrowhead she had bled.  


He has matching scars on his left hand; he trusts her at his back because her scars prove she’d bleed for him, as he has for her. He knows the desperation she’d faced when she gripped his arrow that tightly, and it binds them together, unspoken, because words don’t speak as loud as sliced fingers dripping blood down an arrow’s shaft in the dark of night thirty miles from safety.  


 _(“It’s Barton, he took our systems. He’s headed for the detention lab. Does anybody copy?”)  
_

She goes to face him because he’s scarred more than her body, and she’s afraid that more wounds to her heart might just turn that already-mistrusted muscle into nothing more than a mass of scar tissue. So she goes, because he can only very rarely beat her at hand-to-hand, and she has a scar on her forearm to remind her that he’ll fight dirty to take her down.  


They fight like they haven’t in years, like they haven’t fought since when her forearm had been bleeding freely and he’d bound her hands behind her back with his bowstring. And she knows what she’s fighting for as she sinks her teeth into his muscled forearm and hears his hiss of pain, and wonders if he’d known, all those years ago, what they’d become; if he’d felt what she felt, binding her hands and bringing her home, what she’s feeling now as he murmurs her name like a prayer and she lashes out to knock him to the floor.  


She bandages his arm for him, when he’s lying strapped to the bed; her teeth are smaller than his, but just as sharp, and there’s a neat half-oval she’s carved into his arm because of it.  


But he takes the bandage off, sometime between coming out of the bathroom and suiting up to save the world, and she doesn’t argue with it because she can see in his eyes the same thought in hers: he’s wearing her mark now, like she wears his, because they’re neither of them pure canvases, and they can’t give each other anything more valuable than scars and unspoken promises.  


After the world is saved, after the shawarma and the collapsing and the sleep, she stands in front of the mirror in the bathroom. She is naked, stepping fresh from a shower, and in the misty mirror she stares at her body.  


There is a scar on her forearm from Clint’s teeth, and one on her left shoulder from a knife Coulson couldn’t prevent. There are more scars earned with Clint too, and she catalogues them now: scars on her legs from Tunisia, and on her belly from Moscow; the gunshot to her shoulder was San Francisco. The small, thin line crossing her foot is London, and the half-a-dozen little shreds of lines on her left hip is from the grenade in Munich.  


The scars on her fingers from the arrowhead are from Budapest, and as she lifts her hand to look at them, Clint steps behind her. He’s just as naked, and his touch is gentle as he reaches around her, wrapping his arms around her stomach and coming to stand close, so that his head rests on her shoulder, just above the scar that’s all she has left of Coulson.  


His body is compact and muscled, and she could trace his scars blindfolded.  


“Will you keep it?” he asks, his voice a low rumble in her ear.  


She looks at the newest scar in the mirror, a thin line of still-healing skin so close to her hairline that it’s nearly invisible. She tilts her head to see it better, and tries to remember where she got it – when the copter crashed? When she fought on the streets, back to back with a living legend? When she flew over the streets on an alien machine? When she stabbed the tesseract to save the world?  


She leans back into him, comfortable with her canvas.  


“Yes,” she says, and shuts her eyes. “It’s my first scar as an Avenger.”

**Author's Note:**

> From the Avengers kinkmeme on lj...
> 
> Original prompt: "Natasha has no scars from her time in the Red Room. Hidden by plastic surgery or healed over with experimental technology, scars were suspicious, scars were potential identifiers, and scars were unseemly on a beautiful woman who was forced to use sex as a weapon. 
> 
> She started accumulating scars when she joined SHIELD, and she wears them proudly. Now the stories of the fights she's survived are mapped out on her skin, now she can hide them or reveal them as she chooses because her body is her own. 
> 
> +10000 if there is Clint/Coulson/Natasha friendship or romance"
> 
> Obviously I didn't hit everything, but this is what did emerge.


End file.
